Dead Level (23 page)

That he’d cared. Then, “Okay, let’s hear it,” Wade said, and added, “There’s a can of Coke on the floor there somewhere.”

Sam found it, guzzled gratefully from it. “See, there was this girl,” he began when he’d slaked his thirst somewhat.

The whole complicated story of Richard and what happened on his boat
Courtesan
 … all that could wait, he decided.

The girl was the important part. “I didn’t want to tell her that I don’t drink. I don’t know why.…”

Yes, I do
. He started again. “I was embarrassed. To say so, I mean, that I don’t drink alcohol. I should’ve known what a bad sign that was, that if I couldn’t tell her, then …”

Then it was hopeless
. Once Sam had blurted that part out, the rest of the story poured forth until the next thing stopped him.

During that very short pause, he decided not to talk about the hallucinations he’d had, either. Or whatever they were; he just didn’t think that part of his recent experience would go over very well right now. Instead, he ended with Richard showing up in the room and tying him up, and after that a brief summary of the time he, Sam, had spent on the floor.

“I’m really sorry, Wade. Like I say, I just …”

“They robbed the boatyard office.”

A cluster of small houses lined the shore in Red Beach, the windows mostly dark. Sam found his voice. “What?”

But it already made sense to him. After getting burned by bad checks too many times, the boatyard’s owner had gone to his new policy: the sign reading “No Cash, No Splash” over the office applied to all sales and service, not just launching.

And there’d been a lot of cash in the office. Sam’s heart sank, realizing why.

“Alarm went off after the shop closed,” Wade said.

The alarm was just one of those big brass fire-alarm striker mechanisms, wired up to a motion detector. But the bell was loud; on a quiet night, you could hear it all the way into town.

“Bob Arnold says that by the time he got out there, no one was around. Door hanging open, cashbox gone.”

Sam added it up in his head: a couple of fishing boats had been hauled out of the water, and one put back in after repairs. A few sales of parts and small equipment, dry-dock rentals …

All of which was bad enough. But there’d also been a bunch of summer people in, settling their seasonal accounts. And … the credit card slips, he remembered suddenly. A whole month’s worth of them, because the boatyard took credit cards but it didn’t have an electronic card reader. Instead they used an old manual card imprinter, saved the slips from it to turn in all at once to the bank for payment.

And whoever had those slips also had all the card owners’ credit information.… Oh, Sam thought glumly, he was going to be in so much trouble. It had taken a long time to earn the level of responsibility he enjoyed at the boatyard, and now he’d blown it.

“So did they catch them?” he asked. “Richard and Carol?”

“Not yet. State cops’re on it, though, shouldn’t take ’em long. Car they stole for their getaway had a LoJack tracker in it.” Wade glanced sideways, saw Sam’s face.

“What’s the matter? You don’t want them caught?”

“No, no. I do.” He sighed heavily. “Man, do I ever. It’s just that …”

Swiftly he explained his fresh misery: that it was his job to make the cash deposit at the bank after work. But he’d put it off until tomorrow because he had a date. Hurrying back from Bangor, he’d been in a rush to meet up with Carol.

Then another thought hit him. “Is Mom at the hospital? And how bad are Bella and Granddad hurt, anyway?”

Wade drove fast, the truck plowing along in the rain, and that wasn’t like him. “I haven’t called your mother at the cottage yet. I wanted to find you, first. Your grandfather’s just bruised up a little.”

Shame flooded Sam. He’d been a damned fool, and as a result not only had the boatyard been robbed but Wade had been dealing with all of this by himself. Then another thing hit him:

“How did you find me, anyway?”

Wade squinted past the wipers beating aside the slashing rain. “Desk clerk at the motel saw the picture of you and your two dinner companions in the Rusty Rudder’s front window.”

Sam sighed as Wade went on. “She remembered them checking in a couple nights ago, called Bob Arnold. And he called me.”

A sudden downpour obscured the windshield; Wade waited until it cleared. Then: “She told him she thought they were gone, but I decided to have a look anyway, just in case.”

Wade turned the truck’s heat up. “Bob,” he added, “was at the accident scene already, so he couldn’t.”

Sam puffed a breath out: what a mess. “Is Bella okay?”

The lights of the town of Calais glowed murkily ahead. “She was going into surgery, just before I found you.”

They passed the community college’s collection of dorms and classroom buildings, surrounded by the crumbling remains of what had been, just a generation ago, small working farms. Next came a row of old sea captains’ mansions, once the homes of the town’s most prosperous families but now in need of maintenance and in some cases even of tenants; over the decades, rail had taken over from shipping, and then it, too, dwindled as a source of wealth for the local gentry.

Wade turned left at the convenience store where youngsters in torn jeans hung out smoking cigarettes under the canopy, then left again into the hospital’s parking lot. It was late, so most of the spaces were empty, and the lobby lights had been turned down low inside. Only a few people were in the waiting area.

Sam smelled cleaning products and rubbing alcohol, and told himself again that it wouldn’t have made any difference if he’d been at home. But he knew it would have, that he could have done what Bella and his granddad had set off to do, whatever it was.

Then none of this would’ve happened. But instead, he accused himself bitterly, he’d been panting after a strange new female, as stupidly single-minded as a dog chasing a bitch in heat.

“Bella’s in the recovery room,” Wade said when he came back from the information desk. “So far, so fine.”

Sam let a breath out, then out of the blue felt another wave of foreboding wash over him. He reached out for the railing that ran waist-high along the wall of the hospital corridor.

Wade turned, looking concerned. “Hey, you all right?”

But Sam barely heard. Instead it was his father’s voice, his father’s face capturing him. The late, great Victor Tiptree was suddenly there in all his long-dead, impossibly present glory, and not only that, he had
something to say, something to warn Sam about.…

“Sorry, Dad.”
You’re too late as usual.…
Then, realizing that he’d muttered it aloud and that Wade was staring curiously at him, Sam gave himself an inward shake.

“Got another chill or something for a minute there. I’m fine,” he told Wade as the apparition—or whatever it was—vanished.

He followed Wade through a set of swinging doors to the patient area. The corridor was hushed and dim, most of the doors open only a crack so the sick people could sleep.

At the corridor’s far end, the nurses’ station was an island of light. Wade nodded back at the nurse who waved him on into the one room with its lights still on, and they entered it.

In the big white hospital bed, Bella lay asleep. Wires led from her chest to an EKG machine. IVs ran in; tubes ran out.

“She’ll sleep for another few hours,” the nurse told them quietly from the doorway. “She had a broken rib and a punctured lung, but they’re fixed, and everything went fine.”

Bella’s hair, henna-dyed purplish red, stuck out from under the paper cap she still wore. Her face, all angles and sharp edges, looked rougher and bonier than Sam had ever seen it before.

Her hands lying atop the sheet were mottled and lumpy with arthritis. Tears prickled Sam’s eyes at the sight of them so still; blinking them away, he accompanied Wade out to the hall.

“Can we see Granddad?”

Wade nodded. “Guess I can call your mom now, too.”

Sam said nothing, another rush of shame coming over him, but this time Wade noticed.

“Hey, Sam? Cut me some slack if I’m wrong here, but … this is the kind of thing people drink over, right?”

Bummed out as he was, Sam still had to smile at Wade’s use of the
recovery terminology:
drink over
. Also, Wade was right, and it surprised Sam, though he supposed it shouldn’t, that his stepfather was so perceptive. Sam had always thought of him as a hardworking good guy with a major talent for making his mother happy, but not anything more.

Until now. “Uh, yeah. If a person was inclined to drink over things, this might be one of them. Doing something stupid, so he wasn’t there for his family when they needed him.”

Wade reached out and gripped his shoulder hard. “Listen, we both made some errors tonight, okay? This Carol and Richard, they were real con artists. It’s no surprise they were so believable to you; that’s their job. And …”

He hesitated. “And I’m sorry I jumped to the conclusion that you were drinking, Sam. I’m not usually that gullible, either.”

Wade pulled his cellphone out. “If I wait until morning to tell your mom all this, she’ll have my head on a platter.”

He pressed the keys, then stood with the device to his ear. But from his face as he waited, Sam could tell that no one was picking up. No surprise, really; the clock in the nurses’ station said it was 2 a.m., and if she’d left the phone in her purse, as she often did, his mother probably wouldn’t even hear it.

All of which Wade knew, too, and with everything now under control and Bella resting quietly … Snapping the device shut and stowing it, Wade shrugged. “We’ll catch her later.”

Sam understood the relief in Wade’s voice; his mother would be worried, full of questions, and he and Wade were for different reasons both thoroughly exhausted. But even as he thought this, another flashback—
Is that what it is?
—hit Sam: the dark water in the bilge, the urgency of the nightmarish apparition swirling in it, all mingled somehow with Carol’s red lips …

“Or take a ride out there when it gets light,” Wade added.

“Yeah,” Sam said faintly, still in thrall to the bad-dream howl of impending doom ringing in his ears.
What’s wrong with me?
Dead people
didn’t lunge up out of flooded bilge compartments, dripping and screaming. They didn’t
warn
you about … something.

He was just really messed up, he decided, his near slip now showing itself to him for what it was: another step in a gradual downward trend he simply hadn’t been mindful enough to notice.

His vulnerability, his yearning for acceptance from Carol and Richard … they were part of it, and so was his not having taken that bank deposit in, a bit of carelessness he was going to have to work off forever, he supposed miserably, to pay the money back.

“Thanks for finding me,” he said. “I mean, you kept looking for me. It would have been easier for you to …”

Give up. Decide I deserved whatever mess I was in. Fill in the blank
, Sam thought.

But Wade only shrugged, and then the two of them went off to find Sam’s grandfather’s room, to see with their own eyes that the old man was okay—he was, but sedated and sound asleep—before heading to the cafeteria for coffee and a vending-machine pastry to keep their energy up.

To keep them, as Bella would have put it, bright-eyed and bushytailed.

Ellie and I didn’t talk as we stumbled in darkness down the dirt road back to the cabin. We couldn’t; it was raining too hard, and besides, we didn’t want to make unnecessary noise.

We’d been attacked, first deliberately driven out of the cabin toward the culvert and then nearly drowned. If Ellie hadn’t summoned the strength to bash that window out and drag me through it, we’d still be in the flooded cab.

Now she tramped grimly beside me, smothering a sneeze every so often; besides being soaking wet, we were cold, exhausted, and scared half out of our wits. But
only
half out of them; when we got to the gate, we both stopped at the same moment without having to consult each other.

“It was him, wasn’t it? Dewey Hooper,” Ellie whispered.

“Yeah.” I’d had a decent look. “It was him, all right.” And what that meant, I wasn’t sure. But it couldn’t be good.

“Maybe he thinks we’re dead. Drowned back there.”

“Maybe.” But I doubted it. We’d made a lot of noise getting out of the truck, and even if he hadn’t heard us, I didn’t think he’d take that kind of thing for granted.

The rain was slacking off; I tried cheering myself with that fact and with the knowledge that in a way, we were lucky.

After all, it could’ve been snow. But I’d still never been so cold in my life; last time I’d seen the thermometer outside the cottage window, it had read forty degrees.

“Anyway, it doesn’t matter what he thinks. We’ve got to get inside and get that fire blazing.”

We walked some more. Then it hit me: “Accident. It was supposed to look like an accident.”

It was why he’d shot the windows out instead of shooting us, which he could easily have done. Still could, actually.

Ellie nodded in the darkness beside me. “And afterwards he’d have plenty of time to come back here, make this place look like—what? A fire? Or an explosion, say, if the gas stove blew up?”

“Yup.” Ahead, the cottage was just a big, dark shape in the dripping gloom.

“And while we were escaping in the truck, we had a mishap,” I added. “That would be the theory.”

Of how our deaths had happened, I meant. A shiver that had nothing to do with the temperature went through me; it could have worked. Would have, if we hadn’t been lucky.

Now I hoped our luck wasn’t all used up, because we were going to need it. We wouldn’t have come back here at all if we had anywhere else to go, but the dirt road out was too exposed and bushwhacking through the woods that far at night was out of the question; either we’d get lost or he’d hear us crashing around in the undergrowth and find us out there, or both.

Or we’d get lost and die from exposure. So we really didn’t have a choice. Inside, the cottage smelled like rain, cold ashes, and a whiff of gunpowder. Hurrying to the stove, Ellie put her hand inside and snapped a lighter on. The tiny flame lit her face: